Just curious to see what your home office is like? I'm doing some umm Fall cleaning, backed up everything and formatted both of my desktop's to a clean slate. I'm always trying to use Linux as my main OS but each time I begin to use it, there's some crazy problem that kicks my ass. (ie. everyday at some point, the buttons on my mouse will stop working. no left or right click. try multiple mice and same issue)

Glacier - Old PIII desktop running Debian testing with XFCE.Nan-Madol - Old PIII (not as old as Glacier) running Debian testing with XCFE but mostly used for cli.

Whistler - IBM Thinkpad t60 with a processor and memory upgrade. Currently runs Debian Testing, with Virtual Box.VM Backtrack4r2, Backtrack3, Ubuntu 10.04, 2 Windows XP. They're not usually all ran at the same time.

Windows 7 on my work PC and laptop (unfortunately it's company policy).Windows at home too (because my daughters computer classes are all on Windows/MS Office so they need a Windows system for home work).I've installed Backtrack on VMware on all my work and home systems though just in case I need a *nix unit to check things.At work I work mostly on Linux systems (Slackware, RHEL, CentOS and some custom made kernels) which I just connect to via SecureCRT or PuTTY.

CEH, CCSA NG/AI, NNCSS, MCP, MCSA 2003

There are 10 kinds of people, those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Server 2008, Windows7x2, Qimo (for kids), XPx2, CentOSx3 (my preferred home server OS), Mythbuntu, BT5x2, Samurai-WTF, Ubuntu, pfSense, DD-WRT are all physical installs and then run a variety of VM's on ESXi and VMware WS7 including most of these as well as x86 Solaris, Fedora, Security Onion and whatever else I happen to be working on at the time. Also have 4 different Android devices. My everyday PC runs Win7 Pro but I switch back and forth to my Ubuntu box so frequently it's more of a 60/40 split.

For my base pentest box I use BT5 (heavily customized) w/Win7 VM (sometimes you need a Windows machine) and also a Win2000 VM (sometimes you need a box that works well within natively insecure environments) + a BT5 VPS in Belgium. I also use Samurai-WTF for web based work when I don't want to deal with all the BT5 cruft.

I really need to spend more time with *BSD, the limited exposure on my pfSense box is not sufficient to make me feel comfortable with the OS yet. I also really need to learn more about Mac and Apple products in general. I'm ashamed to say I have not used an Apple product since the IIe.

Last edited by tturner on Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Win 7 Ult on primary desktop with VMs of just about everything for personal use, but also dual boot to a "clean" win 7 build for EnCase work. Work laptop #1 is Ubuntu 11.04 with the corporate win 7 image running in a VM. (suck it IT support) Work laptop #2 I physically trade drives out as either BT5R2 or SANS SIFT. Home server #1 is Ubu 11.04 with a variety of VMs for attack/pen testing, and it also hosts all my rainbow tables. Home server #2 is also ubu 11.04 but mainly used for cli forensic needs and mass storage for forensic images. Old AMD Athlon 4000 based tower is my pfsense firewall and VPN solution for remote access, proxy, and IDS. Not going into detail on random other laptops, maxIpads, and droids.

Pretty much all of my machines dual boot Windows 7 and Fedora 15. I have a variety of USB flash drives with different LiveCDs that I use regularly. A multitude of Virtual Machines that I use regularly as well.

Edit: I hate Gnome 3, I always install Fedora with xfce. Not sure if that makes much difference to you.

Last edited by eth3real on Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's awesome guys. Now I'm getting a good feel for what your systems look like at home. Looks like most all of you run Win7 as your primary OS (or dual booting it with Ubuntu or Fedora). I usually have only had 1 main home desktop and laptop but just a week ago, my dad gave me his "old" one which is a Dell XPS P4 3.3Ghz dual core, 250GB hdd and 3GB RAM. I imagine if you have more than 1 home desktop, it would be wise to seperate your everyday home PC from your pen-testing/lab PC?

Out of the dozen or so OS replies, I've only seen 1 mention of Linux Mint. Even with Unity, it seems Ubuntu still has the upper hand over mint.

My setup looks to be about the same as Engan's with dual booting Win7 & Ubuntu on one box and pen-testing from BT5 in a virual machine.

Since you brought it up, Jamie, I'll go ahead and ask which OS is the most common when doing pen-testing? (or better yet, what "setup" on your system is the most common) I'm thinking of having either 1 main OS of Ubuntu on my pen-testing box with virtual machines of BT5 (attacker) and WinXP/2K (victims). Or if I have the hdd space, maybe it would be better to actually install BT5 on the pen-test box dual booting Ubuntu.